Thoughts on football, books, and life in general

Looking on the bright side

I don’t feel like writing about Birmingham City’s problems at the moment so please look elsewhere if you want an analysis of the club’s financial situation or a match report. Today I’m going to try to look on the bright side of football.

I went to the game on Saturday and don’t regret going. I had no trouble finding a seat on the train there or coming back. So I could read my book, The Orphan Master’s Son, in comfort and feel glad that I don’t live in North Korea. A friendly Wednesdayite helped me and a couple of other Blues fans find our way to the ground on the tram. Hillsborough is a proper football ground with open corners that I probably wouldn’t have appreciated if it hadn’t been such a beautiful sunny day. It was a good day to be out in the open air and worrying about Blues’ defence instead of worrying about more serious things.

And on Sunday, I read two things that made me smile. The first1 was by Rick Coleman, who is a stadium tour guide at St Andrew’s. It reminded me that we have some good people working for the club. I heard about one from a man I met going to Hillsborough. He was a Canadian who started supporting Birmingham City when he lived over here. He’d come over to see three games and when the man who sold him his ticket realised the distance he’d come, he arranged for him to be taken on a tour of the stadium.

The second smile came from a report2 about the banner Liverpool supporters held up at their game with Manchester United: it said: David Moyes is a football genius. I wonder if the ingenious person who thought that up will be offering to rent it to fans of Olympiacos, West Ham, Manchester City etc. Who knows, it might be possible to make a profit out of making a banner. I genuinely feel sorry for any Man U fans that are in shock because their team is in 7th place in the Premier League. How will they cope if something really bad happens to them? Supporting a not-very-good-football team is a much better preparation for life than supporting a team that usually wins.